Iceland Quotes

People are always asking me about eskimos, but there are no eskimos in Iceland.

In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And theres this strange thing: youre never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape. But it makes it very beautiful as well.

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.

Ive walked a lot in the mountains in Iceland. And as you come to a new valley, as you come to a new landscape, you have a certain view. If you stand still, the landscape doesnt necessarily tell you how big it is. It doesnt really tell you what youre looking at. The moment you start to move the mountain starts to move.

Iceland is fascinating; really an amazing place to visit, and great for a film to go there.

Iceland, I'm in love with that country, the people are incredible.

I love England. It's no coincidence it's the first place I moved to for a more cosmopolitan life, which is the only thing Iceland lacks.

When I was a teenager in Iceland people would throw rocks and shout abuse at me because they thought I was weird. I never got that in London no matter what I wore.

The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.

If I wasn't bound to Brooklyn, due to my own personal reasons like taking care of my mother and the fact that this is where the band is based, I would probably move to Iceland.

When I'm in a place like Iceland, I allow myself to take a little more time to divert off onto other paths creatively for a while and see what comes to me.

Genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago.

I do like to write but I also like to get and out and play. I am losing track of all the Cooper versions that I do - I have one for Iceland, different one over here.

I really like Iceland. One of the nicest things about it is that I hardly ever had to reach for my credit card. There's practically nothing there to go shopping for.

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.

There's a reason why Jules Verne chose the place where the glacier was, where we start to descend into the center of the earth. That area specifically has magical powers and people come to this place from all over the world. I actually think that's true of all Iceland. I think it's so special, apart from the water and air being so clean.

Maybe it's just a personal thing, but I get so much grounding from Iceland because I know it's always going to be there. I have a very happy, healthy relationship with the country, so it's really easy to go everywhere because I always have Iceland to go back to. It's sort of a contradiction, but that's how it works somehow.

There is a glacier in Iceland, Solheimar, which has retreated a great deal, and every time I go back there and see what's not there any more, it does something to the heart. It makes you realise it's possible for a gigantic natural element to just disappear.

Iceland is capitalist social democratic, rather like the Nordic countries generally. The capital had a mayor who is an anarchist, but the city has been nothing like that. In fact a few years ago it was super-neoliberal, which led to the crash.

The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.

Travelling with work. I went to Iceland with GMTV last year and I went to Lapland twice with Classic Gold. I also went to America with Keith Chegwin, which must have been a nightmare for the crew, as we're both hyperactive.

I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing Burial Rites, I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.

The Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes - Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

Did you know there's probably more golf played in Iceland than most places in the world? They play 24 hours a day in the summertime and the northern part is warmer than the southern part.

I love hiking in Iceland most, there are lots of brilliant paths.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don’t have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

I was just asking Chad [Myers], how can you get a volcano in Iceland? Isn't it too- when you think of a volcano, you think of Hawaii and long words like that. You don't think of Iceland.You think it's too cold to have a volcano there.

It's curiosity, and always a sense of poetry. You see it in particular in the chapter "Iceland" where I'm reciting ancient Icelandic poetry. It has this very beautiful gravitas in conjunction with the volcanoes.

After a few days [in Iceland] I tried to take a photograph. But with my attempt to distinguish the first shot, the place disappeared on me.... I hadn't been in Iceland long enough to simply be there.

When I was young I had this blonde haircut that was shaved on one side with a rat tail and tram lines in it, but I don't really regret that. It was really elaborate but I was 12 and it looked cool. It was like what people in Iceland do.

Fifteen hundred years is ample time in which to lose mutual comprehension. Iceland was colonized by the Norwegians at the end of the ninth century AD. Today's Icelanders, with considerable effort, can understand people from the Scandinavian peninsula, but the Scandinavians hardly understand the Icelanders. A thousand years is the minimum time span for a language to change so much that it becomes incomprehensible.

Olafur Eliasson is also one of the most visionary artists I've ever met. He is from Denmark and Iceland, and his focus is nothing less than the entire universe.

Now 10 percent of this population [in Iceland] of 330,000 people were born elsewhere - Polish, North Africans, Europeans, Americans - people are coming from all over. It is still changing society in a good way.

I can go wherever, to Kuala Lumpur or wherever, and if somebody will ask me where I'm from and I say I'm from Iceland, they say, "Yeah, Björk." And that makes me very proud, and that makes me proud to be an Icelandic artist.

Now if I lived in my land, which I do, if I lived in Iceland, if I lived in Greensland I'd still have Chinese children, but out of my ears my little grey baby hears.

I'm seldom restricted by anything because I don't know how to restrict myself. It's a blessing and a curse. I feel a lot of support from people in Iceland, especially from people that are content with themselves and their life.

A possibility is that we see more and more leverage, and credit-to-GDP ratios rise once more to even higher levels; eventually the banking systems of all advanced economies reach magnitudes of 500 percent, 1000 percent or more of GDP, so that every economy starts to have financial systems that resemble recent cases like Switzerland, Ireland, Iceland, or Cyprus. That might be a very fragile world to live in.

I've been to the Himalayas a half a dozen times and I love it. I'm just kind of tired of going literally twelve time zones around the world. I would rather go six time zones and get to Iceland or whatever it is.

Iceland's Women's Day Off in 1975 saw 90% of Icelandic women take time off from their paid and unpaid work, an experience that not only showed women how much they contribute but turned Icelandic men into supporters of gender equality. I aim to achieve the same impact in the UK.

It's the reason why so many people left Britain like I did in the mid 60s because Britain was exactly the same then as America is today, getting ready to redistribute social wealth and it didn't work. You've seen that in places like Greece, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland where the entire country's business has collapsed, gone bankrupt. That's where America is heading.

Icy glares from vampires are far icier than icy glares from people and when the vampire giving you an icy glare is originally from Iceland, you're confronted with the archetypal origin of the term, and you shouldn't be surprised if your core body temperature drops a few degrees.

Katie Paterson introduced the project [ Future Library ] to a handful of writers at a very fine international literary festival in Denmark at the Louisiana Museum, I sent her an e-mail when I got back to Iceland, saying, "It's a wonderful project.

Maybe [Iceland] could be sort of a testing ground for solutions because we are few and because we are really a tech-oriented nation. Everybody is a gadget freak. We spend a lot of time indoors.

Public spending on infrastructure has fallen to its lowest level since 1947. And the U.S., which used to have the finest infrastructure in the world, is now ranked 16th according to the World Economic Forum, behind Iceland, Spain, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates.

I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir when I was an exchange student in the north of Iceland.

I usually leave Reykavik for two to three weeks to go to the South Coast of Iceland where I have a small fisherman's hut from the beginning of the last century. That's where I sit down and do the actual writing. I might write for 16 hours a day or something. That's how it happens.

It's always good to see that someone can go out of Iceland and do some things.

I always had a feeling, for example, that there should be something from Verdi's "Requiem" in the film. You hear it when you see the lava flow in Iceland. That turned out to be a very easy choice.

A great number of tourists have been flocking Iceland and those numbers are growing every year. That also raises questions like "How do we receive people?" and "How do we present our country?"